1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to cloud computing systems, and more specifically relates to preemptive extraction of data from long latency storage in a cloud computing environment to economically provide data to customers that is infrequently accessed.
2. Background Art
Cloud computing is a common expression for distributed computing over a network and can also be used with reference to network-based services such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS is a cloud based service that provides physical processing resources to run virtual machines (VMs) as a guest for different customers. The virtual machine may host a user application or a server.
In cloud computing environments, service providers provide data storage services that are optimized for data that is infrequently accessed. This data storage is sometimes referred to as long latency storage, and the data may be referred to as long latency data. The retrieval times of this infrequently accessed data or long latency data may be several minutes or several hours. Thus when a customer has long latency data stored in a service provider's data center and wants to retrieve and/or process the data, the customer's data may take a long time to retrieve. The long latency data may be stored in hosting machines that are powered off and need to be brought online in order to retrieve the data. While data stored in this manner may be less expensive than having a large amount of data stored in low latency storage, the customer usually must pay a premium each time the service provider retrieves long latency data due to the costs of powering on additional resources in the data center and utilizes processing and network resources.